Between 1984 and 1998, Jean Gaumy, a French photojournalist, went to sea four times on open-deck trawlers. He kept a sort of logbook of each voyage, and took photographs. Gaumy is not a natural seaman; but despite constant seasickness, fear, and physical pain, he was drawn to the boats and the life of the men aboard out of a visceral fascination.

His scrawled notes are reproduced here, a plain record of harrowing days and nights at sea, braving conditions above deck and below: “A huge roll knocked us all around… I slide down a long way. Protect my camera but hit a bolt on the bulkhead full force with my rib cage. A really bad crash.

But it’s Gaumy’s black-and-white photographs, which form the bulk of this large-format book, that are worth the queasy price of admission. Nowhere have I seen a grimmer, less pretty, or better portrayal of life at sea. A life no one could be rhapsodic about; of desperate, filthy, terrifying danger. This is what a fisherman’s lot looks like, a brutal truth lived out in the crepuscular hours, at the weaving edge of obliteration.

They’re probably talking, even joking, while a foot away the sea rages, and spume blown by storm winds flies from the wavetops. Who would do such work? Who would go out to sea in such boats for 40 days at a time, work 18 hours a day, to earn sometimes no more than a subsistence wage?